July 20, 2011

My husband, A, finished reading God Emperor of Dune, the fourth book in the original series, for the millionth time while we were away. So I spent a disproportionate amount of our vacation staring at the cover, a lurid display full of gaudy reds and orange swirls that wouldn’t be out of place in a velvet painting, topped with a bunch of little guys in white one-pieces similar to the spandex suits worn by the nihilists in The Big Lebowski, and a giant, black worm with a tortured and bloody-looking dude’s head carved out of the top, sort of like the most terrifying watermelon sculpture possible.

“So, he really turns into a sandworm?” I kept asking, like my repetitive interrogation would somehow make all of that nonsense disappear.

“Because [insert incredibly detailed spiel about some kind of future vision that made Leto realize that he needed to make the ultimate sacrifice and turn into a sandworm to govern Arrakis for the next few hundred years that I was only half listening to].”

“Where’s Alia?”

“She’s dead. This is hundreds of years in the future.”

“So, it’s just a whole book about a sandworm?”

“Well, he has a legion of feisty warrior women who run the planet with him.”

“How does he talk to them?”

“He still has a human head. [insert explanation about Leto’s slow metamorphosis and how he thinks that his human head will disappear and then he’ll go off into the desert and die because I’m pretty sure that’s the Atreides solution to everything].”

“This book is dumb.”

Seriously, what the hell?

I picked up the weighty tome a few times when he was done with it, scanning the occasional page to get some sense of this clearly drug-fueled orgy of overly serious thoughts about worms and sand, but all I came up with was a passage in which Leto explains to the seven millionth incarnation of Duncan Idaho that he still feels his genitals, even though they’ve been gone for centuries.

And I guess it’s an, um… admirable thing that someone in the history of the human race has taken some time to ponder the internal and external life of human/sandworm hybrids and whether or not they’d have phantom genital syndrome, but I just don’t have any patience for that kind of thing. That’s just not my Dune.

My Dune was David Lynch’s Dune. Well, at least partially so. You see, my thing with Dune was particularly narrow in its focus, even for an Asperger’s special interest.

My Dune, as understood and explained by my six-year-old self, was as follows:

There’s this planet with sand and spice and the people eat the spice and they get blue eyes. And there’s this orange thing floating in space because it ate too much spice. And there’s this guy, and the scary woman makes him stick his hand in a box and it really hurts but he can’t take his hand out or he dies but he doesn’t take his hand out and that’s a good thing. And then the guy is on the planet and he knows how to put the special desert suit on even though no one ever showed him! And there’s a little girl who’s really scary and smart and a fat guy with pimples who floats.

For some reason, the suit part was the most important part. To my younger self, Dune was basically a movie about Captain Picard being really impressed by the way that Agent Cooper wore a skintight suit.

As far as special interests go, Dune was not exactly a great love affair. It didn’t last for years on end. I never dragged my parents to lectures by Frank Herbert. I was too young to really attempt reading the books, anyway. I didn’t memorize every possible fact about it. But my Dork Passenger’s brief flirtation with Dune sticks out in my mind for a couple of reasons. First of all, I love being able to brag that I’ve been Lynch fan since I was six years old. Secondly, it marks the first time I was really aware that my special interests weren’t considered cute anymore.

I discovered Dune when I was in kindergarten. I distinctly remember walking into my living room, seeing a giant orange thing floating through space on TV, and thinking that it was the best thing I’d ever witnessed.

I’m not entirely sure why parents let me watch it, and my mother can’t remember the details, although she doesn’t seem to think that it was a big deal. I have a different theory, though.

Despite my mother’s lack of concern in retrospect, my parents were at least somewhat careful about what they let me watch, on account of the fact that I was quite skilled at having nightmares based on innocuous commercials and interstitial programs. They probably rented it with every intention of watching after I went to sleep. But, like many people on the spectrum, I had (and still have, to a certain extent) erratic sleeping habits and, at some point, Mom and Dad probably got so exhausted and desperate to actually watch the movie before they had to return it to the local Videoflixx that they just put the damn thing on. Then I walked into the room. And really, once your kid has seen and become instantly obsessed with a giant orange vagina-faced creature, the damage has pretty much already been done. So they gave in and let their weird and wired kid stick around.

I didn’t really follow the whole movie. Even smart six-year-olds with an autistic sense of focus aren’t really ready for a sci-fi epic in its entirety. And, to be fair, few adults not named David Lynch and maybe not even David Lynch actually knew what the fuck was going on in that thing. But the parts that I did follow and remember became my favourite movie of all time.

I started walking around the house, imagining, in a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that I was Alia, the disturbing, too-adult girl who freaked out the grown-ups. I found a Dune colouring book deeply discounted at the local Bi-Way (there couldn’t have been much of a market for such a thing), carefully selected a burnt sienna crayon from my arsenal of seventy-two colours and wore it down to a nub as I bathed every page in the sandy tones of Arrakis. Then I took out a blue crayon and did everyone’s eyes. I discovered that my school’s library had a copy of the original Dune book, but my excitement was short-lived when I also discovered that kindergarten students weren’t allowed to borrow from the big kids’ section just yet.

Vagina Face! In colouring book form!

I also started telling people about it.

My early experiences with sharing my special interests were uniformly positive. It’s cute when a kid shows a fascination with dinosaurs and adults loved to indulge me during that phase. Asking me to talk about dinosaurs was an adorable party trick. And while the Titanic might have been considered a little more morbid, the ship’s discovery was such a big deal in the mid-eighties that most people in the general population were at least a little charmed by my encyclopedic knowledge of the topic and my unbridled excitement for all things White Star Line. People at Titanic society meetings practically fawned over me. Even Dr. Robert Ballard himself seemed to like me well enough when I met him after a lecture in Toronto.

But there’s nothing cute about a kid who loves one of the most notoriously controversial and (unfairly) reviled sci-fi flicks of all time. In fact, the only thing more creepy and unpleasant than Dune itself, for most people, is listening to a child talk about it.

My ridiculously narrow focus didn’t help matters, either. I mean, I have memories of telling people about the suit scene, with no other context or explanation. Just “In Dune, there’s a guy who is new on the desert planet, and he knows how to put the special desert suit on without anyone having to tell him. And the planet guy is really impressed!” What the hell do you say to that?

I don’t really blame anyone for their reactions to me. You probably shouldn’t encourage a child’s love of Dune, and the colouring book is now, rightfully, considered a horrible, mind-warping idea. But those reactions really did a number on me.

At least some people probably assumed that I was just a spoiled, overindulged child who needed to be taken down a peg or two and taught that she wasn’t a precious snowflake with the best, most fascinating interests ever. Maybe they were right. But maybe not. When I look back on a lot of the clashes that I had with adults who were not immediately related to me during my formative years, it feels more like everyone was so worried about me developing an ego because of my intelligence that they never stopped to determine if I had any self-esteem to begin with.

I didn’t feel special or precious. I certainly didn’t feel entitled to the attention. I liked it, though. Talking to adults about the things that I loved were some of the most positive social experiences of my young life and yes, I wanted more of that.

I had a lot of social blind spots as a child, but I have always been extremely aware of when I’ve done something truly undesirable or when I’ve disappointed someone. And I felt that very acutely when I tried to tell people about my new favourite movie.

In the end, it wasn’t Dune – or even my fucking twisted colouring book– that warped my young mind and destroyed a little piece of my innocence; it was the repercussions of loving Dune that did. It was one of the first events that made me realize that I was different, that there was something odd and off-putting about the things that I loved and that people weren’t really interested in them, or in me talking about them.

It wasn’t enough to stop me completely, and the whole Titanic obsession continued its course unabated until we hit the iceberg of adolescence, but there was something different about my special interests after that. They became more muted in some ways. I knew that I had to be careful about what I did with them, what I said about them and who I said those things to, that I had to hold my interests close to me like any other shameful secret. The innocence and the pure, unbridled excitement were gone.

April 7, 2011

I developed a bit of a fondness for improv in my adolescence. For me, it was just like socializing: I had to perform and think on my feet. But when I did it on stage, I got applause and laughter.

One of the highlights of my mildly illustrious improv career was pinch hitting for a theatre sports team from beautiful Thorold, Ontario. They needed a fourth member and a girl to be able to participate in a school board-wide competition. I had nothing better to do because I had no life. It was a match made in, well, Thorold, Ontario.

I became quite fond of my teammates. They reminded me of a lot of the geeks I had known in my three years in the self-contained gifted program and month in a Dungeons and Dragons club (I didn’t play, but I did pretend to in exchange for getting to spend winter recesses inside) and I had a soft spot for most of their kind back then. But I had an even softer spot for one particular member of the group.

R was most definitely geeky, but he was also about as good-looking as I thought that a boy with short hair could get back then, which made him both accessible and dreamy. We got along well, we shared an interest in improv and we both enjoyed my sense of humour. Even with my chronically low self-esteem, I figured that I had a good shot.

My original plan was to make my move after the competition, but an irresistible opportunity presented itself backstage before the show. As we were psyching ourselves up for battle, the boys started talking about butter fetishes. Having recently gone through a 70’s film phase, I figured that I knew exactly what to say to impress him. And so I flashed R my best attempt at a naughty smile and I made a perfectly timed Last Tango In Paris reference.

But it didn’t exactly go over as well as I’d planned. R just kind of looked at me blankly and moved on. I slunk away and hung out with my parents until showtime. We won the competition and I scored some platonic hugs and platitudes out of it, but it wasn’t enough to lighten my mood.

It never occurred to me that the problem might have had more to do with my reference than me back then. I had begun to learn to start conversations at the beginning and provide context when talking, because other people couldn’t read or follow the thoughts in my head at that point, but I was probably still a year or two away from realizing that different people have different cultural references.

On that night in the late nineties, I genuinely believed that every sixteen-year-old boy knew their Bertolucci. And I knew for a fact that I was the only girl to ever fail to get a sixteen-year-old boy’s attention with an anal sex joke.

April 4, 2011

PRELUDE

Despite my Asperger’s, misanthropy and general surliness, I did manage to have two extremely brief relationships in my teens.

J1 and I went out for a few months when I was in grade seven. Everything seemed to be going well until he started calling me on the phone and expecting me to call back. I was pretty fond of him but, to paraphrase Meatloaf, I would have done anything for like (but I wouldn’t do that). If analogue clocks are the Sauron of my autistic odyssey, telephones are definitely the Saruman. I didn’t hate the part where I actually talked to him, but making or receiving calls proved to be more than I was willing to invest in a relationship with a boy who loved Metallica over me, so I just stopped calling. He ended up dumping me and taking up with another girl while I was home with pneumonia. I felt nothing but relief and gratitude.

J2 and I had a brief flirtation when I was sixteen. We spent half of our summer watching movies and making out. Then I decided that I wanted to share one of my favourite films, Videodrome, with him. He thought that I was showing him a porn flick to get into his pants. He was half right: I had been trying to get into said pants, but whatever yearning I had for him quickly fizzled in light of his assessment of my precious Videodrome. Didn’t he get any of the underlying themes of mass media control? Did he really think that I just sat around at night, rubbing one out to the new flesh? Could I really fuck someone who wasn’t smart enough for Cronenberg?

As it turns out, I couldn’t. And so he moved on to someone whose genitals weren’t governed by Canadian cinema and I spent the rest of the summer trying to write scathing songs about him with lyrics like “But he thinks Videodrome is just about sex/ And his eyes went blank when I said ‘McLuhanesque.’”

Unfortunately, it turns out that girls who rhyme “sex” with “McLuhanesque” don’t get to have the former in high school. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. The language of love is supposed to be universal, but my adolescent self desperately needed an interpreter.